Pastoral research: past, present, and future

In healthcare environments of excellence, clinically trained chaplains are valued members of the medical treatment team. There are skills and values they hold in common with medicine and allied health disciplines: enhancing the health and well-being of the patient as a unity of body, mind, and spirit within a unique family and cultural system. This article examines the past, present, and future of pastoral research, including the chaplain's moral imperative to examine practice and to share what is found.     

Pastoral psychology and the future

Pastoral Psychology -     

Diversity: Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) in the Hinterlands

The author claims that Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) would be enriched if the notion of "diversity" were extended to program configurations, sites, and economic and occupational subgroups as well as to racial, ethnic, gender, and denominational groups as now tends to be the case. The author describes the settings and methodologies of a unique program that brings CPE to "natural caregivers" across the rural Midwest section of the United States.     

Relationship building in Clinical Pastoral Education: a Confucian reflection from Asian chaplains

The authors reflect on the intentional model of relationship building in Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) and its roots in the Western concept of the self as a rational, autonomous, and bounded agent. They compare the Western idea to the Confucian two-dimensional self orientation as relational as well as autonomous, and discuss possible difficulties that Asian students from Confucian background may encounter entering CPE. The chaplains explore implications and suggestions for how CPE supervisors and students may enter into dialogue in order to create mutual understanding and help Asian students translate CPE learning methods into meaningful cultural contexts.     

With the past behind and the future ahead: Back-to-front representation of past and future sentences

Several studies support the psychological reality of a mental timeline that runs from the left to the right and may strongly affect our thinking about time. Ulrich and Maienborn (Cognition 117:126–138, 2010) examined the linguistic relevance of this timeline during the processing of past- and future-related sentences. Their results indicate that the timeline is not activated automatically during sentence comprehension. While no explicit reference of temporal expressions to the left–right axis has been attested (e.g., *the meeting was moved to the left), natural languages refer to the back–front axis in order to encode temporal information (e.g., the meeting was moved forward). Therefore, the present study examines whether a back–frontal timeline becomes automatically activated during the processing of past- and future-related sentences. The results demonstrate a clear effect on reaction time that emerges from a time–space association along the frontal timeline (Experiment 1). However, this activation seems to be nonautomatic (Experiment 2), rendering it unlikely that this frontal timeline is involved in comprehension of the temporal content of sentences.     

From a Distance: Pastoral Care and Theological Education

Abstract. This article is a presentation and discussion of a seminary course on the Corinthian Correspondence. The pedagogical model for this course was structured to parallel the pattern of Paul's pastoral care from a distance as he relates to the Corinthian congregation by personal visits, delegations from and to the congregation, letters from and to the congregation, and unofficial grapevine types of communication. The course was designed for dispersed students to interact with the Corinthian letters, with each other, and with myself as instructor in ways that 1) simulate a first‐century exchange between congregation and apostle and 2) facilitate careful interpretive work on the message of these letters, including their contemporary relevance.     

The past and future of the past tense

What is the interaction between storage and computation in language processing? What is the psychological status of grammatical rules? What are the relative strengths of connectionist and symbolic models of cognition? How are the components of language implemented in the brain? The English past tense has served as an arena for debates on these issues. We defend the theory that irregular past-tense forms are stored in the lexicon, a division of declarative memory, whereas regular forms can be computed by a concatenation rule, which requires the procedural system. Irregulars have the psychological, linguistic and neuropsychological signatures of lexical memory, whereas regulars often have the signatures of grammatical processing. Furthermore, because regular inflection is rule-driven, speakers can apply it whenever memory fails.     

Conceiving the past and future

The authors compared people's views of their histories and futures by asking them to recall and anticipate personally significant episodes. It was hypothesized and found in Study 1 that individuals spontaneously recall an affectively mixed past, containing both "highs" and "lows," whereas they anticipate homogeneously ideal futures. It was further hypothesized that people devote little thought to negative futures, and this was tested directly in Studies 2 and 3 by assessing how quickly past and likely future events came to mind. Asked to report positive and negative episodes from the past and future, participants took longer to generate future negative than positive events. Speed of recall was unaffected by the valence of past episodes. In Study 4, the response latency difference was again replicated for future events and it was demonstrated that people are slower in both generating negative future events and judging those events as likely.     

Reflections for Clinical Pastoral Education Students in Psychiatric Settings

This article focuses on Donald Capps’s books on mental illness. In doing so I highlight three key insights from Capps that I have applied in my own ministry with persons with mental illness in various psychiatric hospitals. These insights, together with my own experience as a chaplain, lead to three practical lessons for clinical pastoral education students in psychiatric settings. I provide some context for my interest in mental illness and my friendship with Capps, as well as some background regarding how Capps’s writings on mental illness fit with certain broader themes in his own work as a pastoral theologian. This essay is personal throughout.     

A psychologist grows in Brooklyn: reflections from the past

In this autobiography, I begin by describing how I made many important decisions in my life without much conscious or verbalized thought. I cover information about my parents, grandparents, early school experiences, and both college and graduate school. The autobiography also includes a detailed discussion of my 41 years of teaching at the University of Tennessee. I discuss important experiences that helped me to become a clinical psychologist and a teacher. I conclude the article with a personal experience concerning the death of my mother and an early memory.     

Commentary: The past and present of the future

Recent research on children's thinking about the future has taken multiple directions, many of which are illustrated in the contributions to this special issue. In this commentary the topic is discussed in the context of research on children's understanding of time, and some of the adaptive challenges of thinking about the future are considered. The studies in this issue show the emergence of some components of thinking about the future in early childhood. More research will be needed to illuminate abilities acquired at later ages and the representations and processes underlying humans’ thinking about the future.     

The interiorizing movement of logical life: reflections on Wolfgang Giegerich

The following article is an account of my discovery of and subsequent immersion in Wolfgang Giegerich's work. A sampling of his voluminous writings on the soul is set out to illustrate how he attempts to penetrate thinkingly into psychological phenomena and his claim that this inevitably brings out their internal dialectic. The article summarizes his critiques of Jung, Hillman, and The Red Book: Liber Novus.     

Discussion: On the future of our past

After integrating the main lines of argumentation developed in the special issue, this paper makes a balance of the question on the public role of the university. Furthermore, the paper focuses on the discussion underlying the articles collected in the issue. A distinction is made between “comprehending” the past and present of the university on the one hand and “justifying” the university and its public role on the other hand. In view of this distinction, it is argued that the question concerning the value of a (normative) idea of the university and its public role is related to the question of democracy. The question is, however, not only whether we live in a democracy, but whether we may still speak of a “commitment to democracy”. An inquiry into the meaningfulness of a (normative) “idea” of the university arises directly from this question. At this point, the viewpoint of Derrida is introduced to discuss the question of the democracy and university of the future.     

Pastoral Care and Medical Education

This essay describes how contemporary medical education and pastoral care share historical roots, confront similar pressures and objectives in the formation of future professionals, and address common concerns in the area of bioethics. The essay concludes with a summary of ideas regarding the present and future relationship between medical education and pastoral care. The essay is dedicated to the memory of David P. Rogers, M.D., whose vision of medical education and medical practice embodied a rare passion for justice.